Chapter 7
We know what happened in the intelligence services before 23 February and on 23 February, but what happened afterwards? What happened afterwards presents very few doubts, and can be told briefly.
There was much nervousness in CESID during the days following the coup. Rumours circulated around the organization’s headquarters about the participation of members of Major Cortina’s unit in the coup attempt; many of them pointed to the three members of the SEA (Sección Especial de Agentes) — Sergeant Sales, Corporals Monge and Moya — to Captain Gómez Iglesias, Captain García-Almenta, Major Cortina’s second-in-command, and Cortina himself; all or almost all of them came from the same source: Captain Rubio Luengo and Sergeant Rando Parra, whom on the afternoon of the coup Monge had told of his adventures as a guide for Tejero’s buses to the Cortes, seconded by Moya and Sales, on the orders of García-Almenta and, according to general inference, of Cortina. The major might have been sure of having created during his five years in command of AOME an organization as elitist, hermetic, loyal and disciplined as an order of sworn knights, but at that time he found out that some of his men had unresolved grievances against him and had decided to take advantage of the opportunity to settle them. They were the ones who went to Calderón, the service’s strongman, to denounce Cortina and the rest of the golpistas of his unit. For obvious reasons, Calderón was terrified by the idea that responsibility for what had happened on 23 February might even graze CESID (the accusations of negligence and lack of foresight were enough to deal with), so he spoke to Cortina and, after being assured that AOME had not taken part in the coup, demanded he speak to his men and tackle the rumours. Over the following days Cortina held meetings with Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra: according to Cortina, he tried to prove to them that their accusations were false; according to Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra, he tried to buy their silence, blackmail and bribe them, and threatened them in a veiled way (the threats from some of their colleagues in the unit they’d informed on were more direct according to Rando Parra, and included insults, death threats and the destruction of a motorcycle). In the middle of March an AOME officer told the leader of the Congressional Defence Committee that the leadership of CESID was trying to cover up the participation of some of his colleagues in the coup, and at the end of the month, pressured from outside and from within — perhaps especially from within — Calderón ordered an investigation under the auspices of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Jáudenes, chief of the Interior Division, who, after several weeks of interrogations of accusers and accused, submitted a report that not unexpectedly absolved CESID in general and Major Cortina and his subordinates in particular of any link whatsoever to the coup.
It was all in vain. A few days after a new director of CESID took possession of his post at the beginning of May and sent the Jáudenes Report to the judge appointed by the government to try the case of those involved in the 23 February coup, Major Cortina was charged. He was not charged because of the report, although it’s likely that some of the information it contained contributed to convincing the judge of his implication in the coup; it was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s fault that he was prosecuted. In his first two declarations before the judge, he mentioned neither Cortina nor his friend Gómez Iglesias, according to Tejero because both of them sent him an identical message through his lawyer: the only thing he’d achieve by giving them away would be to deprive himself of their protection and that of CESID when he needed it most; however, in his third declaration, made at the beginning of April in the Castle of La Palma in Ferrol, the lieutenant colonel claimed that Cortina had been the real instigator of the coup. I’ve already noted the reasons for this change: during the two months since 23 February the defence counsels of almost all the accused had elaborated a joint strategy, cheered by the far-right press, consisting of maintaining the defendants were innocent of the crime of rebellion because they’d simply been obeying the orders of their superior officers, who were obeying the orders of Milans and of Armada, who were in their turn obeying the orders of the King; that was their principal line of argument before the trial and during the trial, and implicating Cortina was not only a way of implicating an essential organization of the state in the coup, but especially, because it could relate the major to Armada and to the King, a way of implicating the upper echelons of the Army and the Crown in the coup. So the third time he testified before the examining magistrate Lieutenant Colonel Tejero decided to forgo the promised shelter of CESID, and told or invented his two encounters with Cortina, accusing him of having spurred on the coup and of being his link to Armada, and on 21 May, after being interrogated by the examining magistrate, Major Cortina went to jail accused of having participated in the coup. Some days later, on 13 June, Captain Gómez Iglesias was charged. No other member of AOME underwent the same fate.
Chapter 8. 23 February
In a way, it was the most dangerous moment of the night. It was half past one in the morning and, after the King’s televised speech condemning the assault on the Cortes and demanding respect for the Constitution, many people all over the country who had been on tenterhooks until then, glued to the radio and the television, went to bed, and almost everyone felt that the appearance of the monarch marked the end of the coup or the beginning of the end of the coup. It was a feeling that was only partly accurate. After Armada’s failure in the Cortes the soft coup of Armada and Milans had failed, but not Tejero’s hard coup, a coup intended to finish with democracy even at the cost of finishing with the monarchy and which — with the lieutenant colonel still occupying the Cortes, Milans’ tanks still on the streets of Valencia, the reactions of the Captains General still pending and many generals, commanders and officers still tempted to act — was still waiting for a minimum movement of troops that might spark off a chain reaction in the Army. The problem was that at that point, with the King now standing firm against the golpistas, such a reaction would have entailed almost necessarily an armed confrontation between those loyal to the Crown and those in rebellion, something that had been a possibility since the beginning of the coup but that had perhaps never been as close to happening as then, when the King’s orders were only just beginning to erode the rebels’ morale and the certainty had not yet spread throughout the Army that the coup was now not going to triumph.
At that time, fifteen minutes after the King appeared on television, ten minutes after Armada left the Cortes without having been able to make his proposal for a unity government to the parliamentarians, the minimal troop movement the golpistas were hoping for occurred: a column of fifteen Land-Rovers occupied by a major, four captains, two lieutenants, five NCOs and a hundred and nine conscripts appeared in the centre of Madrid, got as far as Carrera de San Jerónimo, broke through the double security cordon of Civil Guards and national police surrounding the Cortes and, while the crowd milling around the Hotel Palace tried to discern whether the objective of the recent arrivals was to dislodge the rebels or support them, they joined Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s forces. The column came from the headquarters of the Brunete Armoured Division on the outskirts of the capital and was under the command of Ricardo Pardo Zancada, the same major who on the eve of the coup, during a return trip to Valencia, received from Milans the mission to incite his division to rebellion with the help of General Torres Rojas and Colonel San Martín. Over the course of the whole evening and night Pardo Zancada had watched perplexed, irate and powerless as the rebellion failed at the Brunete once General Juste, the commanding officer, revoked the departure order issued to all the regiments minutes before the assault on the Cortes; embarrassed by the fleeing of Torres Rojas, who shortly after eight had flown back to La Coruña without carrying out his mission, and by the paralysis of San Martín and the rest of the commanders and officers of the unit, so often ardent enthusiasts of a coup, just before one in the morning Pardo Zancada changed out of his standard uniform and into battledress, improvised his column of light vehicles with the collaboration of several young captains and the only two companies stationed at headquarters and, after waiting in formation for more than a quarter of an hour at the exit barrier as a show of defiance or invitation to his comrades, left for the Cortes after verifying that no one was going to swell their ranks and threatening to shoot in the head any soldier who disobeyed his orders.